Esports: League of Legends
Charlie Tran
12/18/2020
The Growing Esports Industry
The first competitive games started on arcade machines in the late 1970s with Space Invader and Twin Galaxies where the professional players strive to beat each other’s record to become the world record holder. In the 1980s, more games were released that many of us know today like Pac-Man. A shift from arcades to gaming consoles occurred with the release of Nintendo systems. The new popularized way of gaming was becoming more accessible to the average consumer than ever before. As Nintendo continued to grow through the 1990s, the fast advancing computer technology became a new and different mode of gaming with personal computers.
1980s competitve games
The large amount of competitive users led to organized competitions where tens of millions of fans of the top games follow these matches allowing the game companies to profit. Eventually these competitive matches transformed into a sport known as Esports. Many of the top games help create and influence the start of Esports teams and organizations made of world-class gamers. In total, hundreds of millions of US dollars are profitted from the Esports industries just through professional tournament prize earnings.
As seen above, in late 1990s to the late 2010s there was a exponential growth in the tournaments’ prize earnings from all Esports teams, orgnaizations, and all variety of competitive. In fact the earnings from tournaments in the last 3 years totals to more than the 20 years before! Unfortunately for the Esports industry in 2020, the toll of the COVID-19 pandemic is evident where large gatherings were impossible to view the professional matches. The canceled tournaments destroyed the potential of growth of Esports although some game companies like Riot Games worked with the teams to provide a remote competitive experience and a fair tournament to take place (more on this later).
These Esports organizations are created with a focus on a specific game and eventually grow from tournament prizes to create different teams for different competitive games. Turning a team into an organization.
The bargraph above shows the top Esports organzations/teams around the world with teams that have contracted professional players who competed in professional matches and earn the tournaments prizes. One of the games that provide one the largest percent of the organization’s total earnings is League of Legends.
Of the top four Esports teams that have earned the majority of their prize from professional tournaments from League of Legends, the three teams, SK Telecom T1, Invictus Gaming, and Fnatic, have all won the international League of Legends Worlds tournament that provides a large monetary prize. League of legends have impacted the massive growth of the largest Esports teams in the world.
What is League of Legends?
